Matter, Magic, and Spirit: Representing Indian and African American Belief (review)

From courageous thinking, thorough scholarship, and intellectually stimulating analysis, David Murray presents a must read with his latest work, Matter, Magic, and Spirit: Representing Indian and African American Beliefs. Through the engagement of a remarkable Famount of literature from the fields of American Indian studies, African American studies, religion, anthropology, and works of American Indian and African American writers and artists, this unique book challenges the reader to rethink how racial hierarchies have affected how American Indian and African American religions have been conceptualized and used in American culture to justify common beliefs (e.g., religious and secular), oppression-based privileges, and associated ideological lenses (i.e., real religion vs. primitive beliefs) over time. Central in Murray's argument is the assertion that using European and Euroamerican standards and values of religion as universals needs to be challenged, if one is to understand the hierarchy of values and meanings that lead to the classification of American Indian and African American religions and moral values as primitive. The author challenges this notion by illuminating how knowledge of the complexities of American Indian and African American religious beliefs was suppressed in order to create so-called primitive religions and spiritualities.

Using a comparative approach, Murray's book explores the origins of how American Indian and African American religions come to be understood as primitive. By examining how the terms fetish, totem, Manitou, and conjure have been used over time, the author engages the political tools these words became for making the beliefs that American Indians and African Americans possessed consistent with existing social customs that deemed them inferior races, rather than providing insight into the complex systems and dynamic practices they comprised. This argument is supported by an engagement of social and scientific attempts to ascribe irrational religious beliefs to American Indians and African Americans and outlines inconsistent patterns of acknowledgment and negation as the realities of American Indian and African American religious practices became trapped by social—and by consequence mainstream scientific—constructions of real religion, superstition, and occult practice. This analysis is followed by an in-depth discussion of the relationship between these scientific constructions and the emergence of the field of folklore: a field that arose in tandem with the cultural emphasis in the United States on rational thought in the nineteenth century.

Murray's work goes on in subsequent chapters to illuminate modernist approaches to primitive religions in the twentieth century. In revisiting the descriptions of so-called primitive mentality in art and religion given by scholars such as Levy-Bruhl, Jesse L. Weston, and even artists like Picaso, and how they compare with the experience near Boasian works of Ella Deloria and Zora Neil Hurston, Murray turns the reader's attention to how the ascription of primitivism to American Indians and African Americans was actively renegotiated—from the inside out—by the previously mentioned scholars and others such as Zitkala Sa and the Society of American Indians. While these works seemed to take the tone of Euroamerican scientists, they actually illuminated the cultural changes, cultural limbo, and adaptations (i.e., religious syncretism between Christianity and Indigenous American Indian and African American religious practices) that American Indians and African Americans were making respectively in the face of being ascribed to the rank of primitive religious practitioner.

Murray's work closes with intellectually engaging examinations of how American Indian and African American scholars and artists utilized the historical record that this process of creating primitive religions generated as "half-truth" community resources to encourage audiences to contemplate the cultural and religious continuity shared with their respective Indigenous pasts. For example, how African American writers and artists use conjure and music in their work as resources of cultural continuity is the central question in Chapter 4. Murray moves the reader further forward in time, after 1920, to discuss the relationship between art and the practice of conjure that manifest in African American art and literature (i.e., Baker, Reed, Saar, Stout...